The Edison High School concert band recently spent time practicing for an upcoming performance.
There was one marked difference, though, from a normal rehearsal. The band members got special instruction from the person who wrote the piece of music they were playing.
Libby Larsen, a Grammy Award-winning composer, spent an hour with the band giving them her thoughts on how the piece should be played. When the band performs the piece in concert on Dec. 12, she plans to be there.
The composition is called “Hambone,” and it’s an enthusiastic number that includes hand clapping, body slapping, a cow bell, a referee’s whistle, and even some vocal contributions from the band. Hambone is a type of dance that involves slapping parts of the body with one’s hands.
Larsen was asked to do the special coaching by Lesley Earles, the band instructor at Edison. She is currently on leave, and substitute teacher Jennifer VanRiper is guiding the band for the Winter Concert.
Larsen grew up in Minneapolis and still lives in the Twin Cities. She is a founder of the Minnesota Composers Forum, now the American Composers Forum. Larsen has had residencies with the Library of Congress, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Charlotte Symphony and the Colorado Symphony.
In 1993, she won a Grammy as producer of Best Classical Vocal Performance.
“Lesley Earles just contacted me out of the blue to work with the band. I enjoy working with that age because they are so fresh into the process and full of energy.”
Larsen told the band that she was a graduate of Southwest High School, and she noted that Earles was well known in the Minnesota music scene. She said she remembers from her high school days that Edison had a reputation for a high quality band.
“In high school I was in trouble all the time,” she told the students. “I was always percussing on my desk or whatever else I thought was a drum.”
She said she wrote her first music as a teenager. “I found out that it was something I can actually do.”
She revealed to the students that she writes the music in her head and only puts it on paper later, when she has a better sense of the pitch and meter.
“It’s really fun to do what I do. And I’m my own boss.”
And then it was time for the band to play “Hambone” for its creator. The first run-through might charitably be called tentative.
Larsen had the band play through different sections of the piece and then play them again. Her main advice was to play it so loud and with such enthusiasm that it will knock the hair back on the conductor and those in the audience.
She asked that the band use a louder whistle, and she encouraged them to play the piece with great energy. By the final rehearsal of the morning, “Hambone” seemed to have a new life to it, and Larsen seemed pleased.
In a Q&A session, she was asked why she wrote “Hambone,” and she said she really likes the rhythm of the body slapping and other quirks of the piece. “Hambone is an amazing tradition in our country. It brings two worlds together.” She said she wrote it while flying on an airplane, but it took an additional six hours to put it on paper.
Asked what she thought was the most difficult part of composing, she said it was putting notations on a page. “I’m trying to communicate something that’s very difficult. And it’s a real challenge to communicate it to your guys’ generation.”
A student asked about writer’s block, and she said she has had plenty of experience with that. “I try not to control it, I just take a break. Usually it means that I’ve just thought myself into a corner.”
Asked what her favorite piece is, she said, “The one I’m working on right now.”
She said she plays the piano, the harmonica and the ukulele.
VanRiper said it was nerve wracking to have a well-known composer in class, but it went fine. “I’d never met Libby Larsen, but I knew her music.”
“The kids just loved it,” VanRiper said. “They thought it was really cool having her there. And she’s such a personable person. The students were very comfortable.”
The concert was on Tuesday, Dec. 12, at 7 p.m. Preceding the concert band was the Edison orchestra and the advanced drum line. The concert band, in addition to “Hambone,” played four other pieces.
Composer Libby Larsen’s piece, “Hambone,” requires a lot of clapping. (Al Zdon)
Larsen told Edison band students to play so loud it “knocks the hair back” on the conductor. (Al Zdon)